A Student at TAW

After finishing school I went to The Drawing Academy to gain knowledge of/and skills in classical drawing techniques. I then applied for the The Animation Workshop for the second time and struck gold! This blog sums up what I've done and is doing now, both in school and for personal fun...

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Teacher decided we should have a little sketching fun drawing the basic 4 psycholigical states on a simple character. The 4th word is supposed to be scared, not surprised; I just copied down the wrong note...

Then we were told to do the same states, using roughly the same poses, but to push it further, taking into consideration aspects such as readability, shapes and silhouettes. Upper sheet is 1st attempt, lower is 2nd attempt.

My personal favourites are the second attempts of angry (lower left) and the scared/surprised ones. They have a nice flow.

Friday, October 29, 2010

We were asked to inbetween a keyed-out 1-character scene from "The Secret of Kells". I already knew this movie and loved its visual style. However, trying to uphold this style in inbetweening made it a much more difficult task than let's say something softer or squishy.

The teacher made some small changes in the time-charts to ease our burden. The end is mostly keys on 'ones', so most of our workload lay in the beginning, where the movement is much more subtle. It was tricky, trying to determine a third of a milimeter, but I loved the practice in interpreting time-charts. I feel that even though this is technically considered low-brainwave work I feel like I've gotten more comfortable with the workings of time-charts. Seriously, those scared me...

(Her mouth had overlapping with the main keys and is supposed to be on a separate layer, so we could just disregard that part)

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

I have this really old-fashioned leather hand-bound book that I bought in China. I absolutely love it, it's one of a kind (although the paper is not the best for drawing), but I constantly find myself thinking "I am not worthy of defiling this cool-looking book with my feeble sketches!"

Ever so often I will make attempts anyway - and because of the brownish paper it's great for experimenting with coloured pencils...

Also for hard light and highlights I experimented with a white-out pen.

And last, a few sketches of my classmates paying attention in class... I had forgotten that I actually enjoy making these. Since the Drawing Academy I've gone back to that comfort zone of not drawing people; this made me realize I had little to worry about. So you'll probably see more of these.

Crime-solving noir anthro-bird and dragon? Sometimes I don't even know...

You ask if I like drawing bird-anthro art? Why, what makes you think that?

John K complains in his blog that all characters today suffer from too much 'TUDE, so here's one of my characters displaying some 'TUDE... haha. John may have a point, now that I think of it.

An early Flash brush practice.

I really try not to, but I suffer from this 'butterfly-as-generic-eyeline-point". Seriously, everytime I draw a character that is supposed to look at something I just sort of stick a butterfly in there...

This is an early character design that I ended up using in one of my animation storyboard portfolio.

I love owls so much; I'm a sucker for those huge, adorable anime eyes.

Development sketches for a species I'm still working on, the Doffogils. Was originally intended as a comic book project, but I never got around to do more than a couple of pages... I still use them in my doodles, though.

Head angle practice on L'rahk the Owlbear...

Character from an unfinished storyboard I did for my animation portfolio.